This disclosure relates to electronic communication and, more particularly, to electronic communication sessions.
Online meetings have become a popular method of communicating. More and more live meetings are occurring over networks such as the internet. For example, voice over IP is a popular way for users to participate in conference calls. Video chats are common where geographically distant parties want to communication face-to-face in real-time. Technologies such as Sametime® unified telephony allow different telephony devices to interact via a common application server infrastructure. (Sametime is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both).
Problems can arise when a load on a server providing online meetings becomes too large. When the load becomes too large, the server may instantly disconnect meetings, may provide poor performance, and may even crash, thus creating an online meeting outage. These outages can frustrate meeting participants, and can result in lost time and productivity. Avoiding or alleviating a large load on a server may provide benefits to meeting participants.